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Spatial Location and Social Organisation: An Analysis of Tikopian Patterns

1977; Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2800993

2397-2548

Alice Bee Kasakoff, John W. Adams,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

The idea that the location of people in space may have a profound influence upon social organisation is not a new one to anthropologists. Tylor (1889: 247), for example, proposed that the societies in which people lived close to their in-laws would be the most likely to have rules that prescribed their avoidance. A popular explanation for whether clans are matrilineal or patrilineal is that they arise from residence patterns which cause matrilateral or patrilateral relatives to live in close proximity (Murdock 1949: 59 sqq.). These are only two examples which have been important in discussions of social organisation. Yet the frequent use of such factors as explanatory devices notwithstanding, social anthropologists have not developed methods for quantitatively describing interaction in space. There are, however, several techniques that have become important in the field of economic geography which anthropologists could use to explore these questions and in this article we apply some of them to data Firth collected on Tikopia. Our purpose is primarily methodological. We wish to show the sorts of insights that can be gained by using these techniques, the variety of uses to which they can be put, as well as to discuss some of the problems involved in using them. In order to use these methods, we needed a description of a society which included information on a large number of interacting settlements including the sizes of their populations as well as exact distances along paths connecting them. It is not surprising that an island, Tikopia, was one of the few cases for which enough information was available. Nevertheless-and despite the fact that Firth has considered that distance on Tikopia plays a significant part in the frequencies of interaction (1959: 211)-it may be objected that an island which is only some 2 miles by 3 miles in compass is too small for spatial parameters to be important. Therefore, although our primary concern in this article will be to analyse the data on marriage, we wish to preface it with results of using some of the techniques from economic geography that demonstrate the importance of distance as a factor on the island. Man (N.S.) II, 48-64.